Amy, Presto, and the Thousand Workers Behind "AI
We pull back the curtain on "fauxtomation" — products sold as autonomous AI where humans are quietly doing the intelligent work. Starting with X.AI's Amy, the scheduling assistant that fooled Silicon Valley, and Remotasks, the data labeling platform where workers earn pennies teaching models to see. Then Presto, the drive-thru voice agent whose human operators were reportedly told not to say "um" so they'd sound more like a machine. And the most absurd case of all: Amazon's Just Walk Out, the cashierless store that reportedly needed around a thousand workers in India reviewing transactions…
The skinny
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